Verweij, S. (2014)
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Verweij, S. (2014). “Booke, go thy wayes”: The Publication, Reading, and Reception of James VI/I's Early Poetic Works. Huntington Library Quarterly, 77(2), 111-131. https://doi.org/10.1525/hlq.2014.77.2.111 Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to published version (if available): 10.1525/hlq.2014.77.2.111 Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document Published as Verweij, S. (2014). “Booke, go thy wayes”: The Publication, Reading, and Reception of James VI/I's Early Poetic Works. Huntington Library Quarterly, 77(2), 111-131. 10.1525/hlq.2014.77.2.111. © 2014 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. 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Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ “Booke, go thy wayes”: The Publication, Reading, and Reception of James VI/I’s Early Poetic Works Sebastiaan Verweij abstract Sebastiaan Verweij presents an analysis of a survey of surviving copies of James VI/I’s Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584, 1585) and His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises in Vacant Houres (1591) in public collections. His survey has unearthed many more readers and owners of the king’s books than were previously known, making it possible to shore up previously tentative proposals about the cultural impact of these collections, not only in Scotland but also in England. He also transcribes and discusses in detail three previously unknown manuscript poems of praise to the king that survive in a copy of the 1584 Essayes now at Lambeth Palace Library, and via these poems offers a potential reassessment of the bibliographical makeup of this book. keywords: James VI/I; printing history; reception history; marginalia; manuscript poetry ! sometime during the second half of 1584, Thomas Vautrollier, the French Huguenot who had established his business in Edinburgh from the early 1580s, first as a bookseller and then as a printer, produced a small but important book of poetry and prose: James VI/I’s The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie.1 Literary scholars and historians alike describe the publication of the Essayes as a momentous occasion in the personal, cultural, and political development of the young King James VI/I, who was, depending on the exact time of printing, either seventeen or eighteen years of age. The book had a definitive impact on the development of Scot- tish Jacobean courtly literature, and it also strongly influenced the literary culture of Scotland more generally. It has also been proposed, perhaps most tantalizingly by 1. On Vautrollier’s brief stint as a printer in Scotland, see R. Dickson and J. P. Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing: From the Beginning of the Art in 1507 to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1890); cf. John Corbett, “The Prentise and the Printer: James VI and Thomas Vautrollier,” in The Apparelling of Truth: Literature and Literary Culture in the Reign of James VI: A Festschrift for Roderick J. Lyall, ed. Kevin J. McGinley and Nicola Royan (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K., 2010), 80–93. Pp. 111–131. ©2014 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2014.77.2.111. huntington library quarterly | vol. 77, no. 2 111 ! 112 sebastiaan verweij Steven May, that the Essayes had influence beyond Scotland’s borders. May has taken issue with a widespread critical idea, the so-called stigma of print theory about late Tudor poets that was advanced and pithily summed up by J. W. Saunders: “gentlemen, then, shunned print.”2 The notion did not convince May, and so he countered with his postulate of the “stigma of verse”: men of certain rank in sixteenth-century England affected not so much a disdain for the printing press as a more general unwillingness to be known to write poetry. By the later decades of the sixteenth century, this affectation had slowly started to erode, not least under the influence of what May regarded as “the most significant printing event of a literary nature”: the publication of the Essayes. May argued that “this title staunchly advances the King’s opposition to the widespread con- tempt in which poetry was held.” Furthermore, “to term poesy a divine art worthy of the service of a royal apprentice strikes boldly at the detractors.”3 This is a powerful and thought-provoking idea: James’s royal authority, and the example he set in one small book of poems, influenced a more liberal attitude toward the printing and dissemina- tion of late Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry as whole. If May is correct, then this was no small achievement on the part of the king. However, May’s idea has not (yet) gained much traction in English literary scholarship, perhaps because hard evidence has been somewhat lacking, or at least, English readers of the Essayes have received relatively short shrift, with one notable exception. That is Gabriel Harvey, whose response to the poetry of King James can be gathered from his copious annotations of both the Essayes and the book that followed it in 1591, His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises in Vacant Houres.4 Harvey’s marginalia have long been on the critical agenda, and his reading is a thrilling example of pre-1603 cross-border intellectual engagement with the king’s works. Moreover, Harvey’s embeddedness within the English literary intelligentsia during the 1580s could be interpreted as a favorable omen of a somewhat wider early English interest in these Scottish books than has been assumed. It is the purpose of this essay to present a newly gathered collection of evidence that fits somewhere between Harvey’s single-reader response and May’s claims of far- reaching indirect influence. Obviously, for James’s poetry to have had any impact, it needed to be read, but only an incoherent picture of the production, circulation, and immediate reception history of the king’s works has so far emerged.5 Whereas such a 2. J. W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” Essays in Criticism 1, no. 2 (1951): 140. 3. Steven W. May, “Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical ‘Stigma of Print,’” Renaissance Papers 10 (1980): 16. 4. Harvey’s books are now at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Lect. 26. On the marginalia, see G. C. Moore-Smith, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford-upon-Avon, U.K., 1913); Eleanor Relle, “Some New Marginalia and Poems of Gabriel Harvey,” Review of English Studies 23, no. 92, n.s. (1972): 401–16; Virginia Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford, 1979); and Jennifer Richards, “Gabriel Harvey, James VI, and the Politics of Reading Early Modern Poetry,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2008): 303–21. 5. The most sustained bibliographical examination was undertaken by James Craigie, principal editor of the king’s works: The Poems of James VI. of Scotland, ed. James Craigie, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1955–58). james vi/i’searlypoeticworKs ! 113 history cannot be written in the space of a single essay, it is the purpose here to lay the foundations, first and foremost by means of analysis of a survey of every extant copy of the 1584 and 1585 Essayes (STC 14373 and 14374) and the 1591 Exercises (STC 14379). Through the electronic English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and subsequent research at the institutions it lists, I located forty-three surviving copies: thirteen of the 1584 Essayes, eleven of the 1585 Essayes, and nineteen of the 1591 Exercises (these numbers exclude books held “in private collections”).6 Some important findings have arisen from this survey. Firstly, it has supplied the names of more owners and readers of the king’s books, both in England and Scot- land, than were hitherto known. Whereas not all these can yet be positively identified, their existence argues for the wide circulation of these books; moreover, a considera- tion of the identifiable owners allows for new insights into the kinds of intellectual milieux in which the king’s books were read. Secondly, the survey has uncovered con- certed plans to distribute the books in England, albeit on a modest scale. Investigation of two special copies of the Essayes has revealed that the king or his supporters employed bibliographical strategies (customized bindings) when disseminating the book to two very esteemed English readers. Also, thirty copies of the book were imme- diately procured for distribution among some of England’s leading press regulators, lawyers, and senior clergy, establishing that, by the time the Exercises were printed, James’s activities as a writer were very closely watched in England. Thirdly and finally, the survey has unearthed a single copy of the Essayes, now at Lambeth Palace Library in London (henceforth LPL), that contains unique manuscript additions, not least three poems to the king.